ANGELUS OAKS: Hwy. 38 open again between valley, Big Bear

For the first time in four days, Highway 38 is open again in the San Bernardino Mountains, where a fuel truck crashed last week, sending gasoline and diesel fuel flooding into a creek.

“We just opened it,” Caltrans spokeswoman Terri Kasinga said about 6:30 p.m. Monday, April 29.

Roughly $500,000 has been spent on removing fuel-tainted soil and repairing the two-lane road that is the main link between the eastern San Bernardino Valley and the mountaintop resorts at Big Bear Lake.

A truck pulling two fuel trailers overturned about 9:30 a.m. Friday, roughly a mile uphill from Angelus Oaks. The crash slightly hurt the driver and closed a three-mile section of the highway between the town and Camp Cedar Falls near Barton Flats.

Cleanup crews recovered 3,500 gallons of fuel from the front trailer, U.S. Forest Service officials have said. But both compartments of the rear trailer ruptured, spilling about 2,900 gallons of gasoline and 1,700 gallons of diesel fuel.

Much of the spilled fuel ran into nearby Cold Creek, which is home to rainbow and brown trout.

No dead fish have been found, said Andrew Hughan, of the California Department of Fish & Wildlife. But officials suspect that the fuel spill has damaged the food chain.

“We do expect to find significant damage to the creek bed at the invertebrate and microorganism level,” Hughan said.

So far, the environmental cleanup has included flushing the creek with thousands of gallons of clean water and collecting the residue in two bands of absorbent padding stretched across the creek. That work began Sunday and continued Monday.

“We’ve flushed the creek twice,” said Hughan. “We got a lot of petroleum out of the creek. So that’s good news.”

The cleanup is expected to continue for at least a couple of days. In part, workers will focus on a steep hillside directly below the crash site, turning over soil with shovels and rakes.

“But that’s not going to affect the road,” Hughan emphasized. “That work’s well off the creek bed.”

Some 318 cubic yards of contaminated dirt already have been hauled away in about 20 big-rigs with double trailers. That dirt has been dumped at a special disposal site in Beatty, Nev., Hughan said.

As crews prepared to flush the creek again Monday, Hughan said he could see that repairs were near complete to the highway, which 24 hours earlier had been the site of a 10-foot-wide, 40-foot-long and 6-foot deep trench produced by the crash and cleanup.

“It’s all filled in with clean dirt. And it’s covered up with asphalt,” Hughan said.